It's a little unlikely that macroscopically the biosphere would evolve to be compatible and microscopically it wouldn't.
I'm not at all sure this would be true. Proteins are proteins, and we consume a staggering variety of those in our hunger for fairly simple amino acids; our digestion isn't concerned with the finer chemical detail of those proteins because brutal destruction suffices. We could probably easily eat off-Earth products of all sorts without restricting ourselves to things that we can breed with or share diseases with. In theory, we could derive nutrition from chemicals unassociated with terrestrial life altogether.
In contrast, diseases need to make use of our bodies in order to be effective. Unlike, say, our digestive fluids, they aren't mere undifferentiated chemicals contaminating us - they are in complex interaction with our cells, especially in the virus case that involves extreme sophistication and surprisingly little flexibility.
Life and the flesh involved won't evolve with the purpose of being edible (quite to the contrary), but diseases can only evolve through thriving in and on specific lifeforms. You won't find "generic" diseases floating around, but generic food is a distinct possibility, as there's nothing "ungeneric" or predator/prey-specific about food to begin with.
I suppose a transporter could keep a reference matrix for each transportee, and then filter out what didn't match that. But how would they allow for mental changes?
By not being 100% accurate and rigid. Mere 98% restoration of pre-infection specs would still help defeat the disease while allowing for the rest of the body to "rattle" enough to retain any memories, bruises or fragrances acquired.
Trek is not hard s.f. and never has been.
Well, there's no such thing as "hard s.f.". If it is "hard", it no longer is "s.f." unless that "f" stands for fact. With the first liberty taken, it becomes "soft" - say, like
Gravity, despite purporting to remain true to the mechanisms of current space travel.
Timo Saloniemi
